Bang! The shot rang in the nave of San Fernando as if it were from an ancient rifle instead of a Browning 9 mm. Three and a half centuries of walls cushioned the shot. The altar boy tolled for the dead in the bell tower. When Commander Pérez had come in search of Nausícaa, he’d found the door of the church slightly ajar. He’d been drawn to it. He’d pulled it open to let his corpulence through.
“God is fanatical, hija.”
This was the nasally voice Pérez heard when he’d first entered the darkness. He had removed his pistol, aimed, and the echo had bounced off the columns of the altar, flown toward the vault, fluttered in the choir.
The cop still couldn’t figure out where to point the barrel.
“God is fanatical, hija, that’s what the Creator, whatever It is, will say to your beloved when It sends him to Hell.” The voice was coming from a drain to the River Styx. Commander Pérez remembered it now. It was the same person who had claimed the bank robber’s body. It was a woman who had transformed herself into man, wearing a nun’s skirt, a black coat, and a priest’s collar-he had seemed back then like a boy in his thirties, his adolescence bizarrely extended. The commander’s obscene sense of smell had drawn him to the river, where some children led him to a dam, to the swollen body laying there in the foam. He hadn’t officially registered the body, which had begun to decompose. The nun, or whatever it was, then threatened to tell the Vatican about the theft of the gold keepsake. But the cop had nullified the threat with an offer of papers that would accredit him as a priest anywhere. In the days that followed, the corpse crumbled apart in the dirty water like pastry dough. Sister Reckless didn’t try to salvage the body, but her apparent indifference was in reality an expression of her abiding love.
“We have a deal, you demonic whore. I made you a priest. Nausícaa gave you the papers herself.”
“I haven’t forgotten. I chose the Castilian monastery at Cantalapiedra, which is a Claretian convent, though none of that mattered squat to them since you gave me a forged passport. So I returned to San Fernando a man, thank you. What I forgot was the deal itself. I agree, I broke it.”
“What do you want, you filthy nun? Do you want to send me to jail because I killed your pathetic lover?”
“My resentment is blacker than the darkness of this church.”
“Where is Nausícaa?”
“You’re looking for her in the wrong place. She’s around the corner. As always.”
“The church door was half-opened.”
“Or half-closed. Go on your way.”
The cop turned, each swell of darkness illuminated by candles forming a niche of shadows. A voice told him: “There is no greater pain than to remember happy times in misery. That’s not me, commander, but Dante, and your misfortune is not having had any happy times, and your tragedy is realizing now, in this instant, that you will never have them, nothing to remember, and that in itself will become an eternity like a shot in the head.”
In Father Próspero’s kitchen, the altar boy finished shredding the meat from the street urchin. It was dawn. The priest sliced cheeks, guts, and eyes for a cocktail, escabeche style, to go with the cous cous. Hunger had given these delicate creatures big apple cheeks. The altar boy went outside to throw the viscera in a ditch. Exhausted from all her weeping, Nausícaa sniffled quietly in her own room and sought refuge in the bathroom. The priest hummed, chose a red onion, coriander, white vinegar, salt, enough lemon juice to clear the foul odors, cleaned the jalapeños, sprinkled black pepper with his thumb and index finger, waved some aromatic herbs, and got everything ready for the marinade. The altar boy returned with the news that there was a dead body inside the temple, surrounded by police, uniformed and plainclothes. “They won’t have had breakfast yet,” said the priest with the torn sneakers, so that the boy would prepare lunch for them. First, however, he needed to tell Nausícaa to go down to Father Diego Tonatiuh’s confessional wearing a veil like María Magdalena.
Morning arrived downtown, and the children of the desert slept in the hope that the sun would wake their agonies in the open grave. The church door was wide open, but the passage to the shadows of San Fernando was blocked by yellow police tape. Nausícaa lifted it to step inside as two uniformed officers looked on indifferently at her purple table-dancing veil. She carried the guilt of the falsely devout. She crossed herself three times. Commander Pérez’s corpse lay at the other end of the nave, the open sleeves of the raincoat making him look like a spoiled angel. A group of dusty judges stood to the side of the pulpit with Saint Michael and the stolen spear.
In a confessional down the other way, a red light flashed. Stop! the priest called out to Nausícaa, raising the sleeve of his habit, a light in the midst of a storm guiding the shipwreck as the tide moaned.
“The angels on the cupola are happy,” said the shadow of the priest, gesturing toward the slipping light. Nausícaa collapsed when he removed his hood. He dragged her into the confession booth, where he sat and she knelt; he lifted her face to him. “Why are you here?”
“For my confession.” Behind the opacity of her pupils, there was a view of a tiled and sticky room upstairs at the police station, the sound of Commander Pérez’s laughter and boasts about how he’d handled the electric drill like a skilled swordsman. Nausícaa had admired the way he grabbed her head and forced her to lick the bank robber’s nobler parts. The two cops outside the booth had a mutual orgasm, then basked in the silence of their brotherhood.
“No, Nausícaa, you have already confessed everything. The rape of the maid’s son isn’t even worth a Mass. You’ve come to return the borrowed spirit whose body is no longer among us. You sent it down to the sewers, to that Great Canal that cleaves this city like an infected vein, through which runs the waste that equalizes all of the inequities of those who live here. You couldn’t take my lover, and you wanted me to lend him to you because, oh, how aroused you got when your big man fucked him up the ass! Cry now, you cheap whore-you’re the only case I know of a rapist whore. Scream, you hag!”
Father Próspero came through the sacristy wearing dark clothes, his Roman collar, and tattered shoes. The altar boy set a table in the Expiatory Chapel, incense smoke trailing his small steps through the many pews of the nave. The police surrounded the priest. His waxen face shone. A commander said something about drug trafficking while the organ on high played, Pange, lingua, gloriosi corporis mysterium, sanguinisque pretiosi, and the rest of the conversation became inaudible. The officer who was speaking had taken part, along with Commander Pérez, in the investigation of a sacristan who, years before, had been assassinated while stealing an eighteenthcentury gold talisman. The murder suspects were Próspero and Diego Tonatiuh; the police never returned the gold.